Adiós to the PRI? Changing voter turnout in Mexico's political transition

Mexican Studies - Estudios Mexicanos

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 17-39

  Klesner, Joseph L ^a   Lawson, Chappell ^b  

^a KENYON COLLEGE   (United States)

^b MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 4244209316     PISSN: 07429797     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/msem.2001.17.1.17     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. "Opposition Candidate Wins Mexican Ballot," Washington Post, July 3, 2000, p. A1.
2. The victory of Vicente Fox has rendered the use of the term "ruling party" to refer to the PRI increasingly problematic. For stylistic reasons, we retain the old characterizations, referring to PAN and PRD as opposition parties and to the PRI as the ruling party.
3. District-level data are taken from the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE) website (http://www. ife. org. mx).
4. Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 79-80.
5. See Juan Molinar Horcasitas, El tiempo de la legitimidad: Elecciones, autoritarismo y democracia en México (Mexico: Cal y Arena, 1991), 76.
6. "Bases of Support for Mexico's Dominant Party," American Political Science Review 64, no. 1 (March 1970): 165. Ames used state-level data from the 1952 through 1967 federal elections.
7. "Oposición y abstencionismo en las elecciones presidenciales, 1964-1982," in Las elecciones en México: Evolución y perspectives, ed. Pablo González Casanova (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1985), 193.
8. Karl M. Schmitt, "Congressional Campaigning in Mexico: A View from the Provinces," Journal of Inter-American Studies 11, no. 1 (1969): 93-110;
9. Wayne A. Cornelius and Ann L. Craig, "Politics in Mexico,"in Comparative Politics Today: A World View, 3rd ed. Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 437-41, 451-2.
10. Ames, "Bases of Support," 163-5;
11. Joseph L. Klesner, "Changing Patterns of Electoral Participation and Official Party Support in Mexico," in Mexican Politics in Transition, ed. Judith Gentleman (Boulder: Westview, 1987).
12. Joseph L. Klesner, "Modernization, Economic Crisis, and Electoral Alignment in Mexico,"Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 9, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 187-223.
13. Jorge I. Domínguez and Alejandro Poiré, eds., Toward Mexico's Democratization: Parties, Campaigns, Elections, and Public Opinion (New York: Routledge, 1999);
14. Jorge I. Domínguez and James A. McCann, Democratizing Mexico: Public Opinion and Electoral Choices (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
15. Voting for the Left (FDN in 1988 and PRD afterward) was negatively related to turnout, although weakly so. Controlling for other variables, this relationship reached statistical significance only in 1994 and 2000 - presidential contests in which PRD candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was not a serious contender).
16. Fraud scattered randomly across all districts would have had the same effect as random measurement error in the dependent variable, reducing the predictive power of the model. Fraud concentrated in the PRI's traditional bases of support would have exaggerated the relationships documented in Table 3; fraud concentrated in opposition-dominated zones would have diluted it.
17. For a systematic study of forms of electoral fraud committed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, see Silvia Gómez Tagle, "Democracy and Power in Mexico: The Meaning of Conflict in the 1979, 1982, and 1985 Federal Elections," in Mexican Politics in Transition, ed. Judith Gentleman (Boulden Westview, 1987).
18. Declining fraud may also account for why partisan biases in turnout appear to have changed more drastically in the aggregate data (which included fabricated votes for the PRI) than in individual-level data discussed below (which include exaggerated estimates of participation by both PRI and opposition supporters).
19. For the 2000 post-electoral poll, self-reported party identification was used in place of voting preference. For the 1991 Gallup poll, the data cover only registered voters; other voters were not asked their partisan preferences.
20. Due to changes in question wording, the number of unaffiliated voters varied substantially from one poll to the next. In general, the unaffiliated had lower self-reported turnout rates than supporters of either PRI or the opposition.
21. This analysis was repeated using different measures of party preference (e. g., partisan self-identification) for those surveys in which such measurements were available (e. g., the 1994 MORI poll and both the pre-electoral and post-electoral cross-sections from the Mexico 2000 Panel Study). Results were broadly similar to those presented in Table 4.
22. Findings are based on binary logistic regression of self-reported turnout. Control variables include age, gender, rural residency, church attendance, education, political interest, affective attitude toward voting, perceptions of electoral integrity, perceptions of political efficacy, perceptions of the importance of voting, and an income proxy. (Data not shown.)
23. PROGRESA is a welfare program targeted at poor families; PROCAMPO is targeted at rural residents; and LICONSA is a nutritional program aimed at families with younger children. On the political manipulation of these programs, see Ignacio Rodríguez Reyna, "La perfecta armonia entre el Progresa y los votos del PRI,"Milenio, (January 17, 2000): 36-45;
24. Guillermo Correa, "El PRI va por el voto pobre: operan a su servicio 173 programas sociales," Proceso, (May 14, 2000): 22-4;
25. Global Exchange, "Las condiciones pre-electorales en Mexico 2000,"report by Global Exchange and Alianza Civica, June 2000; Washington Office on Latin America, "Issue Four: Vote Buying and Coercion,"Mexico Election Monitor 2000, (May 2000).
26. Conclusions are based on both logistic regression models of voter choice in 2000, using data from the Mexico 2000 Panel Study. Control variables include age, gender, urban residency, region, socioeconomic status, education, church attendance, political interest, campaign attention, perceptions of electoral integrity, and attitudes toward the three main political parties. (Data not shown.)
27. Findings from 1988 and 1991 are based on the Gallup polls. Findings from 1994 are based on the MORI pre-electoral poll and the Presidencia post-electoral poll of urban residents.
28. Perceptions of electoral integrity jumped even further after the election of Vicente Fox, to 86 percent.
29. Confidence in the process among opposition supporters and the unaffiliated jumped from 56 percent to 66 percent over the course of the campaign. By contrast, belief in the credibility of the elections remained at 75 percent among priístas.
30. These findings support the conclusions of James A. McCann and Jorge I. Domínguez, "Mexicans React to Electoral Fraud and Political Corruption: An Assessment of Public Opinion and Voting Behavior,"Electoral Studies 17, no. 4 (1998), 496.
31. Authors' conversations and correspondence with Mexican pollsters, Mexico City, June-August 2000.
32. Some commentators have mistakenly attributed polling errors to the so-called "Nicaragua effect," in which wary opposition supporters systematically misrepresented their electoral preferences to pollsters. In Mexico, however, respondents in exit polls taken before Fox's victory was known were perfectly willing to reveal their true preferences, and exit poll results closely tracked actual tallies. Other commentators have attributed in accurate polling predictions to a last-minute surge for Fox, but this claim is not supported by publicly available survey data. See also Alejandro Moreno, "En busca de los votantes del 2 de Julio," Enfoque, August 23, 2000, for a review of the possible causes of pollster error.
33. Frederic C. Schaffer, "Might Cleaning Up Elections Keep People Away from the Polls? Historical and Comparative Perspectives," paper presented at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D. C., August 31 to September 3, 2000.
34. E. E. Schattsneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1960).